He had a brilliant mind. His vocabulary was far beyond his age and his writing skills even farther. His thick black eyebrows and dark hair stood in stark contrast to his strikingly blue eyes. Even now, his mannerisms are so eerily familiar: the way he tucks his feet under him when he sits or the way he swings his arms from the elbows when he walks. I’m not talking about a boy I loved. Well, I did love him, but as a brother. I have four brothers actually, one in blood and three in bond. A bond formed from shared wooden sword fights and bike races. From late nights writing stories and poems together. From escapades into the woods and across roaring creeks in search of dragons and dwarves.

“It’s so empty,” my little brother Eric says flatly. I stare around the barren kitchen with the oven shoved away from the wall, wires sticking out like a gutted animal. The countertop that used to once be filled with sticky peanut butter and jelly handprints and spilled macaroni noodles has a layer of dust over it. “It’s like it’s dead,” he says in a whisper.

Brooks wasn’t a writer like his older brother Elias, but he did love to read. He was our clown and loved to make fun of everything. He would read aloud to us and act out each part of his book, every character with a different voice. His sword fights were full of sound effects and dramatic but comical deaths. Boring afternoons, plagued by weather too hot or too wet to venture outside, were spent contentedly amused by Brooks’ commentary of the movies we watched, his personification and parading around like puppets of the food we ate, and all other manners of hilarity.

Our best friends’ childhood home, way up in the northern mountains of Alaska, was just like what Eric said, dead. It was the first time we had returned after our friends moved. I felt so empty when I wandered through those empty halls. It wasn’t like I had just been punched me in the gut, the air thrown from my lungs, but much scarier; it was as if something was slowly strangling me, a hopeless feeling like I’d never know oxygen again.

There were no overflowing coat hooks and book shelves anymore. The house was vacant of any smell of food or sled dog like it normally was. Just various types of cleaning agents and dust. The ceiling seemed lower, the walls whiter.

     Orian, Baby Ri, being the youngest, had the hardest time keeping up. Our adventures into the forest were often halted by Orian’s fear of getting lost, him getting hurt, or whatever ailment that might inhibit a small child desperately trying to earn his place amongst his older siblings. His shock of white-blonde hair stood out amongst the homogony our dark colored locks. He, like his brother Brooks, was hilarious, just a little less fearless and independent. In all essence though, he was adorable. It was a long time before he could clearly pronounce his “l”s and “th”s. “Ewias! Don’t do dat!” was a phrase that instead of inflicting fear in us, sent us rolling on the floor laughing, but we loved him and the effort he made to fit in with us all the same.

“I hate this.” I say. “I think I might cry.”

 “Me too.” Eric replies.

We wander in slow silence through the rest of the house. It echoes our silence so heavily that it makes our ears ring. So different from the sounds of running and yelling children, sizzling frying pans, flushing toilets, clicking computer keys, and turning book pages that the house had been filled with before. We brush fingertips along naked sheet rock walls, gently tracing faded dirty fingerprints, the only traces left behind of such a joyful past.

 “Let’s go.” I say and Eric agrees. We walk solemnly but quickly back to the door, wanting to rid ourselves of the homesick aches filling our insides.

“I miss them. It’s so boring now,” Eric says once we exit the crushing silence of the old house. All I can manage is a nod in agreement.

The boys fought like all brothers do. Sometimes physically and violently, and yet you could detect a fierce, undying love for each other often not found even in siblings. It showed in the poems Elias wrote for Brooks. It showed in their watchfulness of Baby Ri. It showed in Brooks’ and Orian’s intense admiration and loyalty to Elias.

The dog yard is behind their house. The few tall white spruce trees scattered throughout the yard remain, but only increasingly overgrown circles of dirt are left as evidence of the dog houses and the endless circles the dogs once ran on their chains. Then it hits me. It hadn’t really registered until now, their absence, but seeing the dog yard, once filled with yips and howls and the smell of straw and fur, seeing it empty, boils up a feeling of nostalgia so great I sink to my knees. Eric has left, but I sit there, my knees resting on the soft earth still containing faint sketches of dog prints and cry. A deep ache of grief creeping down my throat and lodging itself in my chest like a stone. Once the tears subside, I get up and walk away, leaving my grief behind only as knee prints in the dirt, as trails traced through the dust on the countertops.